DEAD PEOPLE WALKING
According to Wikipedia.com, a zombie is “an animated corpse resurrected by mystical means, such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotised person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli.” The latter part of this definition fits two of the three protagonists of Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s hilarious Go Goa Gone more accurately than the ‘real’ zombies who show up later in the film.
CINEMA OF DELUSION
Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD
Towards the middle of Bombay Talkies, in Dibakar Banerjee’s short film, Star, actor-in-exile Sadashiv Amrapurkar emerges Yoda-like from a dumpster, every dint a doyen of Marathi theatre, unusual abode notwithstanding. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Purandar, his son or protégé (as seen in Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye with Paresh Rawal’s character, Amrapurkar is presented as an amalgam of a man’s father figures). Purandar has chanced upon a part in a big film, with just an exclamation by way of dialogue. Still he submits himself to a semblance of rehearsal, mostly by mouthing the filmi lines that are a part of every bit actor’s repertoire. The ‘father’ emerges as a taunting hallucination, and Amrapurkar, tantalisingly in his element, draws nuance from bombast, and breaks down the tenets of raw performance that may well be beyond Purandar’s reach. Purandar is a never-has-been, an eternal ham whose funny faces and odd tales even his daughter doesn’t find funny anymore, although he has tasted blood on stage in the distant past. He lives dissolutely in a chawl, and is an object of much amusement amongst its residents, not least because he keeps an emu as a pet, and the daily barbs add to the din of ridicule that seems to inform his life.
THE GHOST HAS THE LAST LAUGH
There’s something intimate and otherworldly about Rashmoni’s (Moushumi Chatterjee) wooden jewellery box. She guards it with her life and grudgingly doles out little pieces of intricate gold to new brides in the household with a bitter word thrown in to underline her disapproval. She keeps meticulous records of her cherished possessions and secretly tries them out in the confines of her chamber. They represent everything her life may have been if fate (or more accurately, the force of patriarchy) hadn’t played its cruel hand. Married at 11 to a much older man, widowed at 12, she has lived in deprivation and neglect ever since, her long tresses cruelly chopped off, her desires trampled even before she discovered them.
IN WITCH KONKONA RETURNS
Kannan Iyer’s directorial debut, Ek Thi Daayan, co-written and co-produced by Vishal Bharadwaj, comes with a curious disclaimer––“This film is a work of fiction and doesn’t stereotype women as witches”––which is greeted with guffaws by the sparse audience. It’s a relevant concern that stereotyping women will only worsen their lot (and daayan, like chudail, is a potent word in our cultural context), but such a disclaimer is hardly the remedy.
A MODERN LOVE STORY
I remember Mrinal Kulkarni (formerly Mrinal Dev) from the seminal Marathi television series Swami, playing young Rama, the gentle, endearing wife of Madhavrao Peshwa while still in her teens. The image has stuck and her later film and television forays never quite matched up to that memory; not even the hugely popular series Avantika. With her directorial debut, Prem Mhanje Prem Mhanje Prem Asta!?, Kulkarni adds a definitive feather to her cap in a delicate and mature romance that reflects accurately and with feeling the churning in urban Marathi society of the post-globalisation era.
Continue reading "REVIEW: Prem Mhanje Prem Mhanje Prem Asta!?" »
LIFE, DEATH AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
We often describe our films as ‘melodramatic’, literally meaning a combination of melody and drama––a heightened representation of emotional states, achieving climax and offering collective catharsis to an audience. Melodrama synthesises social criticism with mythical archetypes thereby enabling the viewers (diverse sections of them, as another essential ingredient of this genre is the near absence of psychological depth) to see the follies of men and institutions combined with the triumph of virtue and punishment of vice. The audience’s involvement with the characters’ journey is critical to the success of the genre.
SHE’S THE MAN
Sai Paranjpye has been conspicuous by her absence from the hullabaloo around her 1981 cult comedy Chashme Buddoor. You can speculate on her reasons though the obvious one that comes to mind is the very idea of remaking a film that’s still so fresh, both in content and treatment, and then handing it over to David Dhawan. No offence to Mr. Dhawan, but a closer reading of the original will reveal healthy contempt for the cinema he practices, or at least that of his predecessors which leads young men like Omi (Rakesh Bedi) and Jomo (Ravi Baswani) to believe that girls of all hues are stupid enough to fall for their scarce charms and a little heckling in the line of courtship is par for the course.
Continue reading "REVIEW: Chashme Buddoor and Chashme Baddoor" »
THE PHOENIX RISES
If you’ve watched Naseeruddin Shah extensively on stage and screen it may be hard to fathom why this exceptional talent (honestly, I don’t have the vocabulary to qualify it beyond clichés) is squandering his reputation on embarrassing fare like Chaalis Chauraasi, Maximum, Sona Spa, etc. Of late, even in middling films (The Dirty Picture, 7 Khoon Maaf and That Girl In Yellow Boots) his presence has been unremarkable, mechanical. What happened to that maverick who’d incarnate equally evocatively, the inflexible blind principal of Sparsh, the eccentric Parsi in Pestonjee, or the desperate fugitive of Paar—a film I watched in my childhood and still can’t erase the memory of his emaciated body herding pigs across a treacherous river? Shah could be intense, angry, subdued, witty, and dominate scenes without affectation, routinely stealing a march on everyone around. Like he did in Zoya Akhtar’s posh fantasy Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara in a five-minute cameo that injected the otherwise soulless wonder of excess with a dash of genuine emotion.
THE BLIND SINGER AND THE JUST KING
In the summer of 1996, as a rookie journalist, I went to Aurangabad and Latur on the campaign trail for the Lok Sabha elections. At a rally addressed by Sharad Pawar and Vilasrao Deshmukh in Latur, there was a youngish, weary-looking woman of modest means sitting cross-legged at the front of the gathering, right next to where I was. While the political speeches continued, the nervous woman kept rolling a piece of paper in her hand wondering how to approach the dais and hand it to one of the leaders. Eventually she mustered courage and reached out to Mr Pawar who distractedly took the paper and kept it with him for the duration of the function. When he was leaving, he tossed a quick glance at it before casually letting it slip from his hand and walking off. The young woman had already left by then, perhaps carrying with her the hope that one of these great men would pay heed to her grievance and alleviate her suffering.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS
Mira Nair’s debut feature film Salaam Bombay which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and had a limited re-release last week, begins like any other conventional film with an underdog hero. Young Krishna (Shafiq Syed with a brilliant screen presence), barely 12 years old, is abandoned by his boss, the manager of a circus, and left to fend for himself with hardly any money in his tattered pockets. He walks up to the nearest railway station, asks for a “bade sheher ka ticket” and arrives in Bombay. In popular cinema he’d have encountered kindly folk all around or stoked his angst to grow up as a messiah for other lost souls like himself, either becoming a smuggler/pickpocket or then, somehow managed to put together the 500 rupees he needs to take back to his village in Karnataka before his mother will accept him back (he ruined someone’s bicycle and has been sent off to make good the loss), his makeshift family bidding him a teary farewell.
Continue reading "ESSAY: Salaam Bombay - 25 Years And Counting" »
